Wedding Workshops…bringing the online, offline

As a purely online business, we only liaise with our wedding couples online – via Facebook comments, tweets, emails or the odd phone call looking for advice on planning their wedding. For any business, particularly if you only exist “online” it can be a challenge as you don’t get face-to-face with your customers but you really want to build engagement with them, get to know them, what they like, don’t like and learn more from them on how you can improve. This is always something we have struggled with to be honest and I have often felt one step removed from the brides and grooms who actually use our website. Conversely I speak to and meet hotels on a daily basis so I feel very connected to them.

While we are very active on social media, and are building our community of brides all the time, we wanted to deepen this relationship and bring our online presence into the offline world with some “reader events”.

In an exciting move for us in WeddingDates for 2016, we have teamed up with Oh Me Oh My DIY to bring a series of Wedding Workshops to the brides of Ireland. Our roadshow will take it all corners of Ireland and each workshop will be a day long event filled with expert demos, DIYs, a delicious lunch, celebratory cocktail and gallons of glitter!

The Wedding Workshops are a way for us to reach out & connect with our community of online brides in real life and bring them together in the offline world to meet, swap ideas and inspiration and learn from the best in the business about how to DIY elements of their big day and really put their own stamp on their venue.

For the venues participating it is a way for them to showcase their venue to a group of girls many of whom are highly active on social media, bloggers and influencers. We just hosted the first one yesterday in Flemings Restaurant in Cork and got such great feedback from attendees…

I want to come to the next one and bring my friend, she’d love the flower DIY section!

You can get a flavour of the day with a look at some of the photos from yesterday..